Zynga Previews Its Next ‘Ville Sequel, CityVille 2, In Closed Beta In the Philippines

Zynga just announced that it’s launching the sequel to its hit CityVille today in a closed beta test.

The company blog post doesn’t offer too many details about the game itself, beyond saying “It has all the features in CityVille that players love – from neighbor visits and crews to buildables – blended with some of the innovations we introduced in CastleVille and FarmVille 2 like crafting and 3D graphics.” (You can get a preview of the aforementioned graphics in the image at the top of this post.)

It looks like that shift doesn’t mean Zynga is abandoning the franchises that it’s known for. CityVille famously surpassed FarmVille as Zynga’s most popular game back in 2010, and it was one of the top Facebook games last year (on a pure numbers basis, it seemed like it should have been ranked No. 1). According to AppData, it currently has 2.2 million daily active users and 16.8 monthly active users.